Audio multi-party conferencing is critical to conducting business today. Circuit-switched audio conferencing can be initiated from a participant's phone but typically is limited to three or fewer participants. Outsourced conferencing services enable multi-party conference calls of larger numbers of participants. Such outsourced conferencing services, however, have become a significant expense for many organizations.
Audio and video web conferencing is rapidly replacing circuit-switched audio conferencing. Using such applications, users, through a graphical user interface, can set up conference calls among a large number of parties. The applications have been integrated with electronic calendars to schedule seamlessly the calls. When a user identifies the conference call participants and specifies conference call time and duration, invitations are sent automatically to each desired participant to docket the call time and contact information on each participant's electronic calendar. The invitation can include conference call options to indicate whether and how the potential participant will participate in the conference call. As each conference call option selection is received, another updated conference call invitation is sent to each participant. At the scheduled time, the conference call is initiated by the originating participant's teleconferencing bridge automatically or by each participant calling into the bridge. When automated, the order of joining the participants is generally based on the order in which the invitations are generated or accepted or by random selection. Such applications have reduced corporate expenses by eliminating outsourced conferencing services and saving per-port charges levied by the telecommunication service providers for each teleconferencing minute.
Although audio and web conferencing is a major improvement over circuit-switched audio conferencing, it still gives the originating participant only limited control over the configuration of the conference call.